SST's catalog is finally available on ITunes. It's good timing for me; although I've had ITunes on my computer for at least as long as I've had my IPod - over a year - I only started using it last month, first approaching it gingerly as though it might bite me, then warming up and gorging myself.
The main thing I like about ITunes is having the option to buy individual songs rather than whole albums. As a musician, I hate that people can do that but as a consumer I love it. The truth is, I really don't want more than a few of the songs off Desolation Boulevard. Why spend over 18 clams to buy that Outkast album when you can just fork over a buck for that great Hey Ya song? And as far as SST goes, while I've long had most of the Husker Du catalog on CD, and Damaged, of course, the only Minutemen CD I own doesn't feature one of their greatest songs, "Little Man With A Gun In His Hand," which I can now buy without dropping the coin on the rest of that CD, which is good, but a little outside my budget right now.
But the reviews on ITunes can be pretty wacked. Check out this blurb from the review of Black Flag's My War:
...a pretentious mess of a record with a totally worthless second side. Featuring three tracks of slower-than-Black-Sabbath muck with Henry Rollins howling like a caged animal, it was self-indlugence masquerading as inspiration and about as much fun as wading through a tar pit.
Heresy! It's side A of that record that blows, with the exception of "Forever Time." The B-side of My War is one of the greatest 20 minute stretches of pissed-off anti-social rock ever recorded, right up there with the A-side of Funhouse. As a teenager I blasted that shit at full volume almost daily as the soundtrack to my seemingly terrible life. Besides fulfilling every audio craving of a 16 year-old white male from the suburbs - screaming, tortured ravings about feeling like shit recorded with a double-wide truckload of low-end that felt like a wrecking ball of testosterone smashing into your nether regions, delivered with all the subtlety of a punch in the face - those three songs offered the added bonus of driving everybody else nuts, especially punk rockers. The B-side of My War is sheer genius and I question the taste of anybody who doesn't embrace it. When I first heard Damaged I was blown away because I'd never heard a record that sounded anything remotely like that. To accomplish the same feat with your next record is like hitting the lottery two days in a row - Black Flag should be given a medal, not poo-poohed by some nameless geek on ITunes. That reviewer is exactly the kind of halfwit who thought shit like R.E.M. and the BoDeans was groundbreaking in the 80s.
Anyway, I'm going to go spend three bucks for just the B-side of My War and I suggest you do the same.
UPDATE: I don't know how I could've forgotten it, but one of the best things about SST on ITunes is that you can pick up two great releases by Saccharine Trust.
Paganicons is a great record that takes the formula for Damaged and somehow manages to create something even darker and more desperate. It's an interesting example of minimalist-style punk, albeit taking a different tack than the Minutemen, the Urinals and Wire before them. "We Don't Need Freedom" and "I Am Right" are anthems deserving classic status right alongside "Rise Above" and "Six Pack."
But We Became Snakes is Saccharine Trust's masterpiece. If Paganicons wasn't as great a record as Damaged, the band's metamorphisis in the period prior to their next record was even more astonishing than the changes in Black Flag between Damaged and My War. We Became Snakes is a record that doesn't really bear any resemblance to anything that came before it. Jack Brewer's beat-poet vocals, the intensely jazz-influenced rhythm section, Joe Baiza's playing, which makes his guitar sound like an altogether new guitar-like instrument - it all adds up to something that I can't even describe. It's sort of like Spinal Tap going free jazz without sucking, or something like that. Go to ITunes and download the title track for a taste.
SST released a pretty eclectic group of records in the 80s, though most of them weren't very good; I could never understand the appeal of the Meat Puppets and the less said about Das Damen, DC-3 and SWA, the better. And it got to the point pretty quickly where as quirky and unpredictable as the stuff was supposed to be, it became pretty easy to peg anything coming out of the offices in Redondo Beach (usually as overblown piffle). But We Became Snakes deserves better than to be filed away under Boring Wanky SST Crap From The 80s.
